Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the CIA program "inhuman."The war crimes were committed in your name, America. They were authorized by then President Bush and Vice-President Cheney, and other Bush cabinet officials knew what was going on. They knew and did not stop these acts of brutal torture that served no purpose in protecting the country. We know Republicans are willing to do anything to prevent America from finding out the full truth behind the authorization of these acts.Health personnel offered supervision and even assistance as suspected al-Qaeda operatives were beaten, deprived of food, exposed to temperature extremes and subjected to waterboarding, the relief agency said in the 2007 report, a copy of which was posted on a magazine Web site yesterday. The report quoted one medical official as telling a detainee: "I look after your body only because we need you for information."
New details about alleged CIA interrogation practices were contained in the 43-page volume written by ICRC officials who were given unprecedented access to the CIA's "high-value detainees" in late 2006. While excerpts of the report were leaked previously, the entire document was made public for the first time by author Mark Danner, a journalism professor, on the Web site of the New York Review of Books.
The confidential report sheds additional light on the CIA's handling of the detainees, who were held in secret overseas prisons for up to four years and subjected to what the agency describes as "enhanced interrogation techniques." In addition to widely reported methods such as waterboarding, the report alleges that several of the detainees were forced to stand for days in painful positions with their arms shackled overhead. One prisoner reported being shackled in this manner for "two to three months, seven days of prolonged stress standing followed by two days of being able to sit or lie down."
In addition to the coercive methods -- which the ICRC said "amounted to torture" and a violation of U.S. and international treaty obligations -- the report said detainees were routinely threatened with further violence against themselves and their families. Nine of the 14 prisoners said they were threatened with "electric shocks, infection with HIV, sodomy of the detainee and . . . being brought close to death," it said.
This was done in our name. History will not be kind to us. Perhaps if you believe in fate, or karma, or a great national reckoning, maybe you view our current economic situation as a not so gentle reminder that what goes around, comes around.
I'm certainly willing to entertain that as a theory about right now.
Zander wrote,"This was done in our name. History will not be kind to us. Perhaps if you believe in fate, or karma, or a great national reckoning, maybe you view our current economic situation as a not so gentle reminder that what goes around, comes around." That sums it up quite nicely I think.
ReplyDeleteI think it's part of war. I don't like the thought of anyone being tortured. But that is war. The idea that two countries can fight to the death but not cross certain lines is absurd. The people who cross the lines win the war.
ReplyDeleteI still believe that if someone was about to kill thousands of people, I would do what I believed I had to in order to save those people. That doesn't mean we have to like it. It just means that under certain circumstances we might have to do it.
Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.
I love you to death, Bon.
ReplyDeleteBut it's not part of war. The Geneva Conventions were created, and the United States signed the treaty, so that this specifically would not be a part of war.
When we broke that treaty and made it a part of war, the information we got from it was a wild goose chase.
It's not absurd at all. It's international law.
I love you, too. And I don't want the following to be misconstrued as an insult to you. I had to think about this for a long time to determine for sure how I felt about it (months going on years). This is really the first time I've talked about it in a public forum. That said, here is what I think. Most of it is about torture, some of it is just about fighting in general.
ReplyDeleteSigning was a mistake. Because we have put our soldiers in the impossible situation of fighting by the rules against people who don't give a damn about the rules. We did that before in Vietnam, and look how it turned out. We got our asses handed to us, and thousands died for nothing.
And nobody can really say what it has led to. For all we know, a thousand travesties were avoided, or a thousand goose chases ensued. Pro or con, you can't really use what we know about the results, because it's a drop in the bucket of what has really taken place.
Would history be kinder to us if we lost by principles that our enemy uses to defeat us? I don't want to go in the history books as "and of course they lost and the world was terrorized for another hundred years, but by golly, those guys were NICE." Are we monsters? Or are we doing everything it takes to prevent mass murderers from overtaking the world, even if that means we have to face the unpleasant consequences of completing the task? Is it more heroic to take some dirt in the face and win, or let these guys blow up churches and schools because we don't have the will to do what must be done to stop them?
Are wars won by humane efforts, or by the guys with the bigger stick and the willingness to use it? History speaks loud and clear on that, and it's contrary to what we all want the answer to be. I can think of a dozen battles where the "bad guys" won by being the smartest and the toughest. I can't think of a single one where the right side won by doing the noble thing.
Maybe we'll learn our lesson and realize you can't have it both ways. There is no such thing as humane war. If you're going to fight a war, you have to accept there will be blood on your hands and it's not about glory or heroic deeds. It's killing, that's all war has ever been. Kill until the other side gives in. The time for leaders to follow their conscience is before bombs fall and bullets fly. After that, winning is what it's all about.
I wonder how many more soldiers are going to die for us while we tell them from our moral high horse how to do their job of killing the enemy without actually making us feel bad about it.
Sorry, that was me. I was signed in doing something else.
ReplyDeleteSun Tzu said it best: "If you are bound by rules that your enemy does not follow, you are at a disadvantage in all things."
ReplyDeleteI respect your argument Bon, but many of the men we captured and detained were not our enemy.
They became our enemy when we tortured them, however.
We have to draw the line somewhere, or else there will be nothing but war.